Hello everyone and welcome to our seventh dev journal about the Stealth Mod we are making for the Sigil System.
In our previous five journal we showed a quick example of the Stealth Mod rules in action and so today we are just going to wrap everything up. As such it should be fairly short blog today.
What changed
Overall, not a lot.
There were two big issues that folks brought up about the system. The first was that leaving the reduction of Awareness Levels mostly to time elapsing didn’t give the players a lot of agency. While there are the “narrative actions” that players can also take to reduce the Awareness Level, these are unknown variables that are completely contextual and so could not be planned for ahead of time. So we had a think about it and decided to use our current meta-currency (the Sigils) to help with this issue. So now along with time and narrative actions, you can also spend a Sigil to reduce the Awareness Level by 1 step. This solves the player agency problem, and it will also mean that players use (and therefore run out of) Sigils more often which allows for more GM-intrusions in the game, making everything a tad more exciting.
The other issue brought to our attention was one of granularity. For some readers, having ten steps on the Awareness Scale was a bit too much and they would have preferred a simpler and more vague approach. The Sigil System is all about granularity and working with things in groups of 10s so we couldn’t quite change the Stealth Mod to accommodate this, but there is a compromise to be had: the GLYPH system. GLYPH is already a scaled down and simplified version of the Sigil System and so we decided that we can just port over the Stealth Mod to GLYPH as well when we release it. GLYPH is a faster paced game so a 5 step Awareness Scale would go well with it. And, of course, we do enjoy having our cake and eating it too.
In short
So, to sum up the Stealth Mod: It all revolves around the Awareness Scale which is a reflection of the mood of the compound you are in. The higher the Awareness Level on the Scale, the worse it is for you and the NPCs in the compound will react to it and you. Failed Stealth Skill Checks and narrative actions make the Awareness Level go up; and time, narrative actions and spent Sigils (or Glyphs for GLYPH) make the Awareness Level go down. If the compound you are in is too big to handle, you can chop it up into manageable zones and any zone the players are not in will simply play catch up to the Awareness Level to the zone they are in.
And that’s it!
All we need to do now is rewrite all of these journals into something coherent, tidy and tart it all up and then we’ll have it up on DriveThruRPG for you absolutely free.
Until then, why not have a look at the campaign book we just released this week which takes place in The Runed Age, where the Sigil System comes from. Just click on the picture and enjoy!
